The concept of luck comes up in competition sometimes, like "That was a lucky shot," or "He got knocked out by a lucky punch." I think the general consensus is that there's no such thing as a lucky shot or a lucky punch. You could say luck had almost nothing to do with it. Plus, calling it lucky detracts from the hours and hours of practice and perfection and skill that went into that one event. It's not just insulting to call it lucky. It's ignorant.

But I think there's a deeper level of luck involved in some cases. Not luck in the sense that a random action was taken at a random time and happened to produce a positive result. But rather that a series of well-executed actions took place in the exact right order and produced a positive result. The shot itself wasn't lucky, but it was predicated on the precise timing and exact positioning of the previous event, which itself benefitted from similarly perfect preceding events. The final result is like a series of probabilities multiplied together: 70% chance of the first event succeeding, 50% chance of the second event succeeding, 20% chance of the third event succeeding = 0.7*0.5*0.2 = 0.07 or 7% overall chance of all events succeeding. A probability like 7% looks like luck, and it sort of is. But it's much more than that. #sports